The Art Neuro Weblog

The Day My PC Died
I was really attached to it because I picked the parts and built it. It was my brain child, and only 2 years and 7 months into its life, it died. Did I get a lot of use out of it? Yes. Did I achieve what I thought I would with it? Not really - the Mac does what i want a computer to do for me. But the PC was so fundamentally mine in a way that say, a song I wrote and stuck up on iComposition might be mine. Now I have to replace it and I don't have the energy to do the research and parts hunting; I'm just a little bit more weary.

I have to warn you all that until I do manage to replace a PC, I'm not going to link to articles because it'ss actually a lot more tedious in the safari interface than it is with IE5. Blame Blogger and my ennui. Or life. Or my dead PC. Or the fact that my HTML skills are simply not up to scratch to be able to write the code for in-text lnks. So please forgive me; when I get a new PC I promise I'll link to everything.

It's the 5th Wintel PC that died on me: a A Pentium 166MHz, A P3 466MHz, A P4 1.7Ghz, anoher P4 1.7GHz I got from a generous friend and now my 2.4GHz.
That's pretty disturbing considering that my old Commodore Amigas tended to keep working way into their obsolescence, I'm a little surprised by how Wintel boxes tend to be so much more vulnerable. It makes me worry for the future of my Mac, but my friends' Macs seem to do what the old Amigas do, which is keep on working until they are well and truly obsolete that when they go, you don't miss them the way I'm missing my PC right now. That's right. I run both systems and I still think there are a lot of merits to both systems. Still, there is nothing like the grief you get when a PC starts going wonky and then wobbly until it just simply packs it in; diagnosis not withstanding, the motherboard just goes bung. It's a good thing they come relatively cheap.

I spent the day rying to revive the machine, but my efforts were in vain; I ended up taking the data off the hard drives through the firewire drive trays. It took all afternoon - a very long, long, long afternoon. At the end of it, I just moved the dead computer out of my room. Oh yeah. I get to move some of the other computer clutter out of my room. I'm now a 1 computer man, an Apple Macintosh man to boot. How things change.

- Art Neuro